The Sims 4 will be missing family trees as well

This man is weeping because he can no longer recall what his grandparents look like.

Sorry everyone, it’s another news post about a feature that won’t be in The Sims 4. It’s not that I enjoy writing about bits that are missing from games that probably shouldn’t be missing, it’s just that Maxis keeps making it so easy.

The latest feature to go awol from the upcoming entry in the series is family trees. This has been confirmed by German Sims fan site SimTimes, who were able to ask Sims 4 Senior Producer Lyndsay Pearson about the feature at a (presumably Gamescom based) presentation event.

The family tree in The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 allowed you to keep track of the generational relationships between your various Sim families. While The Sims 4 will have familial relationships in terms of brother, sister and so on, it apparently won’t provide any sort of tool for charting the generational aspects.

If you’ve missed the previous news about certain curiously absent features, here’s a quick re-cap. There aren’t going to be any swimming pools because the in-house GlassBox Engine designed by Maxis apparently can’t handle that. The game will also be missing a great many of the “normal” career types like doctor or athlete, in favour of wackier jobs. Create-a-Style is no longer there, either.

On the slightly more positive side, the Create-a-Sim demo is pretty versatile and available to download and play now. Modding support will be in from the start, too.